Nabokov's rapturous masterpiece of erotic obsession entered the common consciousness and inspired two films. It also inspired Nabokov himself to try his hand at screenwriting, and the result was this typically graceful and ingenious screenplay, which he wrote in 1960. "Lolita: A Screenplay" gleefull[...]

'Look at the harlequins ...Play! Invent the world! Invent reality'. This is the childhood advice given by an aunt to Russian born writer Vadim Vadimovich, who emigrates to England, then Paris, then Germany and then the US, and, now dying, reconstructs his past. He remembers Iris his first wife, Anne[...]

A fastidiously shaped series of lectures based on a chapter-by-chapter synopsis of the Spanish classic. Rejecting the common interpretation of Don Quixote as a warm satire, Nabokov perceives the work as a catalog of cruelty through which the gaunt knight passes. Edited and with a Preface by Fredson [...]

In a speech given in December 1925, Vladimir Nabokov declared that 'everything in the world plays', including 'love, nature, the arts, and domestic puns.' All of Nabokov's novels contain scenes of games: chess, scrabble, cards, football, croquet, tennis, and boxing, the play of light and the play of[...]

"Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of my tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta."

Humbert Humbert is a middle-aged, frustrated college professor. In love with his landlady's twelve-year[...]

A landmark publication of the literary master's unfinished final work is a fragmented draft as hand-written on 138 index cards that were originally requested for destruction and have been released by his son.[...]

Vladimir Nabokov's earliest major work, written when he was twenty-four, is a full-length play in verse of Shakespearean beauty and richness.
The story of an incognito king whose love for the wife of a banished revolutionary brings on the chaos the king has fought to prevent, this five-act play [...]

From one of the 20th century's great writers comes one of the finest autobiographies of our time. "Speak, Memory" was first published by Vladimir Nabokov in 1951 as "Conclusive Evidence" and then assiduously revised and republished in 1966. The Everyman's Library edition includes, for the first time[...]

Simon Karlinsky has substantially expanded and revised the first edition of Vladimir Nabokov and Edmund Wilson's correspondence to include fifty-nine letters discovered subsequent to the book's original publication in 1979. Since then, five volumes of Edmund Wilson's diaries have been published, as [...]

When it was published in 1955, "Lolita" immediately became a cause celebre because of the freedom and sophistication with which it handled the unusual erotic predilections of its protagonist. But Vladimir Nabokov's wise, ironic, elegant masterpiece owes its stature as one of the twentieth century's [...]

Speak, Memory, first published in 1951 as Conclusive Evidence and then assiduously revised in 1966, is an elegant and rich evocation of Nabokov's life and times, even as it offers incisive insights into his major works, including Lolita, Pnin, Despair, The Gift, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, an[...]